“There are so many advertisements that I don’t even look at them anymore,” says Jeanne, disillusioned, at this bus stop located near the town hall of L’Haÿ-les-Roses at the end of last week. What if the poster was replaced by a work by Monet? This is the bet made by this town in Val-de-Marne, the only one for the time being in the department, one of five towns in Île-de-France (with Aubervilliers in Seine-Saint-Denis, Bagneux, Meudon and Puteaux in Hauts-de-Seine), to have joined forces with “Beauty will save the world”, named after a cultural system imagined in 2021 by the town of Saint-Dizier (Haute-Marne) at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It consists of swapping advertisements on billboards for works of art in the same format in order to “put art and beauty” within everyone’s reach. They are selected around a common theme by the GrandPalaisRmn, the Meeting of National Museums – Grand Palais, whose mission is to promote access to culture throughout the national territory. However, the street, the public space, is “the last place where those who no longer have anything in common” argue the initiators of this project.
Next year, works in front of construction sites
In L’Hay-les-Roses, seven works have been broadcast for a few days and until the end of the week in the six districts of the city on the theme of “light in art”. Among them are “Les Périssoires”, from Gustave Caillebotte“Moonlight on the River”, by Lowell Birge Harrison, “La Calanque”, by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer. All in 1.20 m by 1.70 m format, that of advertising panels attached to bus stops, for example.
“We want to poeticize our streets and our display spaces so that they are no longer just elements of passage but places of dialogue, thought and emotion”, indicates the mayor (DVD) of L’Haÿ-les -Roses, Clément Decrouy. “We joined the system a little late, and it will be much more visible next year,” they say at the town hall. On the same principle, the city aims to extend works in the form of large tarpaulins on certain construction sites. “Beauty will save the world”, which will be structured next year in the form of an association, wishes to generalize the operation “everywhere in France” in 2025.